A World Within

This essay and drawing responded to Michael Haneke’s film Amour, and was created for inclusion in SET Collective’s film zine. This was specially published as part of the exhibition The Everyday Experience at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), which was curated by the Irish Architecture Foundation. This publication was accompanied by a screening of Amour at IMMA. A special edition of the essay and drawing was later exhibited at the Describing Architecture exhibition in Dublin in 2014.

The project is an exercise in translation – from the film set back to the drawing, mirroring Haneke’s process of replicating his childhood apartment in Vienna for the film. It attempts to combine what philosopher Martin Heidegger distinguishes between measured rational space and experiential space (the situational, contextual, sensing perceiving body in space). The essay explores the increasingly ambiguous relationship between the mental and metaphorical landscapes in Haneke’s film. ‘Lived space is always a combination of external space and inner mental space, actuality and mental projection.’ Pallasmaa, J. ‘Lived Space in Architecture and Cinema’ in The Architecture of Image. Existential Space in Cinema.